Sir Rex Richards obituary
Rex Richards, who has died aged 96, was a scientist driven not only by a personal thirst for discovery but by the satisfaction of creating conditions in which others could flourish.
He was practical and inventive, but having helped to pioneer the application of a new method of analysis – nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR – to chemistry, biology and medicine, he devoted most of his energies to engineering the kinds of collaboration that would drive the subject forward.
One consequence was that Britain rapidly acquired a world-leading position in the development of superconducting magnets for magnetic resonance imaging body scanners.
His research in the 1960s as a professor of chemistry at Oxford University depended on the development of large, superconducting magnets that could generate very powerful and uniform magnetic fields. Working in partnership with Martin Wood, founder of the startup company Oxford Instruments (OI), Richards and his colleagues stimulated the production of ever more powerful magnets, which OI sold commercially worldwide.
When Peter Mansfield at the University of Nottingham demonstrated that you could use NMR to produce images of the living body, OI was perfectly poised to produce the magnets he needed. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has since revolutionised both clinical diagnosis and research in areas such as neuroscience, and Mansfield shared the Nobel prize for his discovery.
Richards himself took a different path. NMR spectroscopy lines up the nuclei of atoms such as hydrogen in a magnetic field, then jolts them with a burst of radio waves that makes them jump to a different orientation. In doing so they transmit their own tiny signals, and the characteristic spectra of different molecules give insights into their structure and function.
In the late 60s Richards was a key player in a British effort to exploit new technologies such as NMR spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography to understand the function of enzymes, molecules that act as catalysts for all the chemical reactions that keep the body alive.
In an early venture into interdisciplinary working, independent of the rigid departmental structure of Oxford University, he and others came together as the Oxford Enzyme Group. OEG was a loose collaboration of “20 prima donnas” from several departments that met fortnightly under Richards’s chairmanship from 1969 until 1984.
In 1970 they obtained a Science Research Council grant to buy a new magnet and associated equipment for studies of enzyme structure and function. In addition to these “test tube” studies, researchers led by Richards and the biochemist George Radda carried out pioneering NMR research into biochemical processes within intact biological tissue, such as muscle. This led to the installation in 1983 of the first whole-body NMR spectroscopy unit to probe energy metabolism in human patients at the John Radcliffe hospital in Oxford.
Richards described this period as “very thrilling”, but by then he had already taken on the first of many administrative roles that would increasingly move him away from the laboratory bench.
He served as warden of Merton College, Oxford (1969-84), and was vicechancellor of the University of Oxford (1977-81). Aged 62 he began a 10-year tenure as director of the Leverhulme Trust, a major funder of science and the arts. Finding its grant-making systems impossibly antiquated and laborious, he spent every weekend for a year personally programming a computer database to manage them.
Born in Colyton, Devon, Rex was the son of Harold Richards, a builder and timber valuer, and his wife, Edith (nee Humphries), who managed her husband’s business. Rex attended Colyton grammar school and then studied chemistry at St John’s College, Oxford, contributing to research in infrared spectroscopy with HW “Tommy” Thompson and, after graduating with a first in 1945, completing a doctorate.
The American physicists Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell had recently demonstrated the phenomenon of NMR, and, looking for research to call his own, Richards saw that it could have applications in chemistry. Despite an initial rebuff from the only Oxford physicist with expertise in the area, he built his own equipment, getting the Cowley motor works in Oxford to cast the iron for his magnet and winding miles of copper wire with his own hands.
He dismembered old radar receivers to make the spectrometer that would detect the NMR signals, and began initially to study molecules in crystals. After a fellowship at Harvard in 1955 that enabled him to consult Purcell, he designed and built a new, high-resolution spectrometer that could distinguish the signals from different nuclei in chemical solutions.
One problem was that the electromagnet used enormous amounts of electricity. When Richards heard in 1965 that Wood, at OI, was developing superconducting magnets that used only a small amount of power for cooling, he was quick to get in touch. Their collaboration provided the foundation for a golden period in NMR research, leading to his knighthood in 1977.
Richards was renowned for his skill on committees: among many other positions, he chaired the British Postgraduate Medical Federation, which ran several specialist London hospitals, and headed a task force on clinical academic careers.
His serious appreciation of contemporary art found him serving as a trustee of both the Tate Gallery and the National Gallery. He was a friend of Henry Moore, and chaired the trustees of the Henry Moore Foundation.
Richards and his wife, Eva (nee Vago), were discerning buyers of contemporary British art, both for themselves and other organisations. He was instrumental in arranging for a portrait of the Nobel prizewinning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin to be painted by Bryan Organ for the Royal Society – it had no portraits of women at that point – and also commissioned a series of drawings of her arthritic hands by Moore.
In all his activities he was supported by Eva, a Hungarian refugee and fellow spectroscopist, whom he married in 1948, and who pursued her own scientific career. During his period as warden at Merton they took a personal interest in the well-being of undergraduates at a time when there was little concept of pastoral care in universities, and also introduced initiatives to widen access.
He was a generous and warmhearted colleague who valued human relationships and, despite the impossibly grand list of positions he collected, was never grand in his dealings with others.
Eva died in 2009. He is survived by their daughters, Jill and Frances, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
• Rex Edward Richards, chemist, born 28 October 1922; died 15 July 2019